The Pavillion de l’Esprit Nouveau (1925) The House as a Machine Although the Pavillion de l’Esprit Nouveau met the fate of all exhibition buildings—it was demolished in 1926—the famous dwelling was rebuilt in Bologna Italy in 1977 by the architectural firm Oubrerie e...

Le Corbusier (1887-1965) From Purism as Painting to Purism as Architecture To use the term “Art Deco” today is to introduce an anachronism, because to the extent that the style of this period had a name at all it was “Art Moderne,” a name used in the 1920s and 1930s....

Robert Mallet-Stevens (1885-1945) The Architect of Art Deco, Part Two The semiotics of Robert Mallet-Stevens was completely different from those of the other modern architects, such as Mies van der Rohr. The radical modern architects were dedicated to building for the...

Robert Mallet-Stevens (1885-1945) The Architect of Art Deco, Part One The architectural counterpart to Le Corbusier and his purist radical modern architecture was the less purist less radical yet still modern architecture of Robert Mallet-Stevens. Time and shifting...

Defining Art Deco The Meaning of “Moderne” One should always beware of long titles, too many words usually conceal or reveal inner contradictions. Take, for example, the 1925 Paris International Exposition, the name of which is long and self-defeating:...

The Brief Existence of Constructivism At the Paris Fair of 1925 The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts was “international,” stressing the nationalism of the post-war period, but the French, the host nation, proved to be...

The Brief Existence of Constructivism The Years of Lenin The word “Constructivism” was a Russian word that came from multiple sources in Russia and spread to Western Europe very quickly, as soon as the Civil War ended in 1921. In fact, the slogan of the 1920 Dada Fair...

Producing Soviet Culture Popova and Stepanova The study of modern art and design is noteworthy for its lack of women included in the history. That is not to say that there were no women who were artists—to the contrary, there were numerous women who braved the odds...

Gustav Klutsis (1895-1938) The Last of the Avant-Garde Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova were lucky to live out their lives peacefully. In the brutal period of Stalin’s Russia, artists were suppressed. Starting in the late 1920s, the mood of the government...

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) The Photomontage Poster Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), formally a painter, retired from painting in 1921 and became a designer of posters that became iconic of the brief period of favoritism and freedom. A patriot, loyal to this new...

The Russian Avant-Garde and Agit-Prop Posters Out of “Art” and into the Revolution In 1917, the Russian Empire, assaulted from within and without, finally crumbled under its own anachronistic weight, bending under the burden of the unheard demands of a...

French Artists at the World’s Fair The Last of Cubism, Part Three For Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the opportunity to decorate two buildings, one dedicated to airplanes and the other featuring trains, was too good to refuse. Both artists had long been painting...

French Artists at the World’s Fair The Last of Cubism, Part Two Although the 1925 exposition, the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, introduced a style for modern design, later known as “art deco,” was enormously...

French Artists at the World’s Fair The Last of Cubism, Part One In 1929, the French Chamber of Deputies, fresh off their success with the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts of 1925 decided to repeat the fair in a decade. However,...

The Delaunays and Modern Life Paris Between the Wars, In 1889, the year that France celebrated the centenary of the Revolution, is best known for the shock of the new tower rising from the Champs de Mars, the Eiffel Tower, but that year was also the year that the...

Cubism After Cubism Part Two: Orphism Between the Wars At 4:35 a.m on a chill and cloudy day in July, on the 25th day of the year 1909, a daring French aviator Louis Blériot (1872-1936), took off in an airplane of his own making, rising above Calais on the coast and...

Cubism After Cubism Part One: Theories of Pre-War Orphism Before the Great War, there were camps occupying various terrains within the art movement called “Cubism.” The name, as is well-known, was a bon mot coming either from Henri Matisse or Louis...

Cubism After Cubism Paris Coming to Order, Part Two There was a second life for Cubism after the Great War. This lingering phase, a further development of an important art style was carried on by the so-called “Salon Cubistes,” who, although they had been away at...

Cubism After Cubism Paris Coming to Order, Part One What happened to Cubism? Before the Great War broke out, the movement seemed to be dominant, even hegemonic in Paris, but after the War was over, Cubism was history. In other words, the Great War nothing would ever...

The Weissenhof Experiment in Stuttgart Neues Bauen in 1927 The Nazis, newly in power and early simmering with racist hatred for all things un-German, didn’t know what to make of the shining white city on the hill. So utterly alien to the fascists was the...

MASTERS’ HOUSES Walter Gropius, Junkerswerke, and Modern Architecture Today the architecture of Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and his series of Bauhaus designed domestic dwellings for the Masters, the “Meisterhäuser,” at the art school are considered jewels in the...

PORTRAITURE REBORN George Grosz as “Hanswurst” Even thought Dada dissolved in Berlin and the Dada perpetrators went their separate ways, one of the former members, George Grosz (1893-1959) never lost his disgust for Germany and for the German people. His...

PORTRAITURE REBORN The Likeness as Blank Parody Portraiture had its greatest days in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries–think of Thomas Gainsborough’s proud aristocrats and of Thomas Romney’s posed nobility–consider the...

THE CONSTRUCTION OF INFORMATION The PhotoEssay in the Weimar Republic In 1919 Austrian artist Raoul Haussmann (1886-1971) found an image in the Berlin Illustrated News (Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung), a seemingly innocuous photographic portrait of the defense minister...

AFTER THE GREAT WAR John Heartfield: The Social Critic One might ask, if there was a Third Reich, when were the first two Reichs and where does the Weimar Republic fit in? It’s an interesting question because in answering it, one comes to realize that the...